Public to get say on pig cell therapy By REBECCA PALMER - The...

Public to get say on pig cell therapy
By REBECCA PALMER - The Dominion Post | Friday, 11 July 2008

The National Health Committee is consulting on an application by Living Cell Technologies to conduct a clinical trial of pig cell transplantation at Auckland's Middlemore Hospital.

If Health Minister David Cunliffe approves the trial, pig pancreatic cells in a seaweed-based gel will be injected into the abdomens of eight people with type-1 diabetes.

The committee has a month to prepare advice for Mr Cunliffe.

The trial has already been approved by a Health Research Council committee, which concluded there was enough evidence that the therapy was safe and had the potential to be effective.

An ethics committee also gave it the green light, subject to certain conditions being addressed by the minister.

But last October the Sustainability Council called for "significant public consultation", saying New Zealand was ill-prepared for outbreaks of a new disease.

Living Cell Technologies has been carrying out a similar trial on Russian patients after a New Zealand study was halted in 1996 amid fears that the transplants could spread pig viruses to humans.

There is no evidence of people catching porcine endogenous retrovirus from pig transplants. But the committee's consultation document says the possibility cannot be ruled out.

Living Cell Technologies - an international biotechnology company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange - has just expanded the Russian trial because of positive preliminary results.

Medical director Professor Bob Elliott, the Auckland scientist who pioneered the therapy, said yesterday that the sixth patient was injected with pig cells last week.

He was given a double dose based on the findings from the previous patients. Pig insulin had been detected in the blood of the first two patients, who had shown a reduced need for insulin injections.

"What we have already is a pretty useful treatment ... I don't think there's any debate that it works." It was now more an issue of the dosage and the extent to which it worked.